SoroushVahidi/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Accurate and dense wide-baseline stereo matching using SW-POC
(2011)

This paper proposes an accurate and dense wide-baseline stereo matching method using Scaled Window Phase-Only Correlation (SW-POC). The wide-baseline setting of the stereo camera can improve the accuracy of the 3D reconstruction compared with the short-baseline setting. However, it is difficult to find accurate and dense correspondence from wide-baseline stereo images due to its large perspective distortion. Addressing this problem, we employ the SW-POC, which is a correspondence matching method using 1D POC with the concept of Scale Window Matching (SWM). The use of SW-POC makes it possible to find the accurate and dense correspondence from a wide-baseline stereo image pair with low computational cost. We also apply the proposed method to 3D reconstruction using a moving and uncalibrated consumer digital camera.
Assessment of chronic pain coping strategies
(2004)

Introduction. We made an adaptation of the Coping Strategies Questionnaire (CSQ) to the Spanish population. This measure, the most used in its scope, was developed by Rosenstiel and Keefe in 1983. Method. 205 participants coming from Primary Health Care and pain clinics made up the sample. More than half suffered migraine and chronic tension-type headache; the rest, fibromyalgia, low back pain, arthrosis or arthritis. Results. Factor analyses explained 59% of the total variance, on an 8-factor structure that converged into a 2-factor structure. In the 8-factor solution the novelty was the diversification of mental-non-mental distraction strategies, and religious-non-religious hope strategies. In the 2-factor solution the novelty was the grouping according to the efficacy of the coping. All the CSQ factors showed inner consistency and construct validity. Thus, unadaptive coping strategies were related to negative, anxious and depressed self-talk, related to lack of control and perceived self-efficacy, and related to many pain behaviors. On the contrary it happened with adaptive coping strategies. In addition, the diagnosis of pain was related to the utilization and effectiveness of coping strategies. Conclussions. CSQ is shown to be a reliable and valid measure of coping strategies in chronic pain in the Spanish population, showing the difference between theoretical and empirical factor structures again.
Heart rate variability is associated with emotion recognition: direct evidence for a relationship between the autonomic nervous system and social cognition.
(2012)

It is well established that heart rate variability (HRV) plays an important role in social communication. Polyvagal theory suggests that HRV may provide a sensitive marker of one's ability to respond and recognize social cues. The aim of the present study was to directly test this hypothesis. Resting-state HRV was collected and performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test was assessed in 65 volunteers. HRV was positively associated with performance on this emotion recognition task confirming our hypothesis and these findings were retained after controlling for a variety of confounding variables known to influence HRV - sex, BMI, smoking habits, physical activity levels, depression, anxiety, and stress. Our data suggests that increased HRV may provide a novel marker of one's ability to recognize emotions in humans. Implications for understanding the biological basis of emotion recognition, and social impairment in humans are discussed.
Medusa: a programming framework for crowd-sensing applications
(2012)

The ubiquity of smartphones and their on-board sensing capabilities motivates crowd-sensing, a capability that harnesses the power of crowds to collect sensor data from a large number of mobile phone users. Unlike previous work on wireless sensing, crowd-sensing poses several novel requirements: support for humans-in-the-loop to trigger sensing actions or review results, the need for incentives, as well as privacy and security. Beyond existing crowd-sourcing systems, crowd-sensing exploits sensing and processing capabilities of mobile devices. In this paper, we design and implement Medusa, a novel programming framework for crowd-sensing that satisfies these requirements. Medusa provides high-level abstractions for specifying the steps required to complete a crowd-sensing task, and employs a distributed runtime system that coordinates the execution of these tasks between smartphones and a cluster on the cloud. We have implemented ten crowd-sensing tasks on a prototype of Medusa. We find that Medusa task descriptions are two orders of magnitude smaller than standalone systems required to implement those crowd-sensing tasks, and the runtime has low overhead and is robust to dynamics and resource attacks.
The Cultural Evolution of Religion
(2009)

After almost a century of dwelling in two “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Steven Jay Gould once put it, religion and science are coming together again. Long the exclusive province of the humanities and left outside of the mainstream of psychology and the behavioural sciences, religion is gaining scientific attention at a rapid pace. The dismantling of the taboos that have kept religion out of the scientific spotlight will take time (Dennett, 2006). Nevertheless, these are exciting times, and we can now safely say that religion—to paraphrase Chomsky about language—has been upgraded from scientific mystery to scientific puzzle (Boyer, 2001). This growing scientific interest promises to offer a naturalistic account for a deeply affecting aspect of human lives that is widespread in all known cultures in the world.
DIAC+: a Professional Diacritics Recovering System
(2008)

In languages that use diacritical characters, if these special signs are stripped-off from a word, the resulted string of characters may not exist in the language, and therefore its normative form is, in general, easy to recover. However, this is not always the case, as presence or absence of a diacritical sign attached to a base letter of a word which exists in both variants, may change its grammatical properties or even the meaning, making the recovery of the missing diacritics a difficult task, not only for a program but sometimes even for a human reader. We describe and evaluate an accurate knowledge-based system for automatic recovering the missing diacritics in MSOffice documents written in Romanian. For the rare cases when the system is not able to reliably make a decision, it either provides the user a list of words with their recovery suggestions, or probabilistically choose one of the possible changes, but leaves a trace (a highlighted comment) on each word the modification of which was uncertain.
A Performance Comparison of Open-Source Stream Processing Platforms
(2016)

Distributed stream processing platforms is a new class of real-time monitoring systems that analyze and extracts knowledge from large continuous streams of data. This type of systems is crucial for providing high throughput and low latency required by Big Data or Internet of Things monitoring applications. This paper describes and analyzes three main open-source distributed stream- processing platforms: Storm Flink, and Spark Streaming. We analyze the system architectures and we compare their main features. We carry out two experiments concerning anomaly detection on network traffic to evaluate the throughput efficiency and the resilience to node failures. Results show that the performance of native stream processing systems, Storm and Flink, is up to 15 times higher than the micro-batch processing system, Spark Streaming. On the other hand, Spark Streaming is more robust to node failures and provides recovery without losses.
An Introduction to Active Shape Models ∗
(1992)

Biomedical images usually contain complex objects, which will vary in appearance significantly from one image to another. Attempting to measure or detect the presence of particular structures in such images can be a daunting task. The inherent variability will thwart naive schemes. However, by using models which can cope with the variability it is possible to successfully analyse complex images. Here we will consider a number of methods where the model represents the expected shape and local grey-level structure of a target object in an image. Model-based methods make use of a prior model of what is expected in the image, and typically attempt to find the best match of the model to the data in a new image. Having matched the model, one can then make measurements or test whether the target is actually present. This approach is a ‘top-down’ strategy, and differs significantly from ‘bottomup’ methods. In the latter the image data is examined at a low level, looking for local structures such as edges or regions, which are assembled into groups in an attempt to identify objects of interest. Without a global model of what to expect, this approach is difficult and prone to failure. A wide variety of model based approaches have been explored (see the review below). This chapter will concentrate on a statistical approach, in which a model is built from analysing the appearance of a set of labelled examples. Where structures vary in shape or texture, it is possible to learn what are plausible variations and what are not. A new image can be interpreted by finding the best plausible match of the model to the image data. The advantages of such a method are that
Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) for Emotion Classification from Noisy Speech
(2016)

Despite the enormous interest in emotion classification from speech, the impact of noise on emotion classification is not well understood. This is important because, due to the tremendous advancement of the smartphone technology, it can be a powerful medium for speech emotion recognition in the outside laboratory natural environment, which is likely to incorporate background noise in the speech. We capitalize on the current breakthrough of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and seek to investigate its performance for emotion classification from noisy speech. We particularly focus on the recently proposed Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), which is yet to be explored for emotion recognition from speech. Experiments conducted with speech compounded with eight different types of noises reveal that GRU incurs an 18.16% smaller run-time while performing quite comparably to the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), which is the most popular Recurrent Neural Network proposed to date. This result is promising for any embedded platform in general and will initiate further studies to utilize GRU to its full potential for emotion recognition on smartphones.
Class-Conditional Superresolution with GANs
(2017)

● Super resolution enhances the resolution of a low-res image. ● Many deep learning models today work fairly well with an upscaling factor of 4x but use only the downscaled image as input. ● We demonstrate two class-conditional GAN models that outperform state-of-the-art GANs for superresolution: ○ Explicitly passes in a known class parameter as input ○ Uses a separately trained classifier to inform a ResNet about character attributes ● Both improve the quality of the super-resolved output.
Learning Structured Output Representation using Deep Conditional Generative Models
(2015)

Supervised deep learning has been successfully applied to many recognition problems. Although it can approximate a complex many-to-one function well when a large amount of training data is provided, it is still challenging to model complex structured output representations that effectively perform probabilistic inference and make diverse predictions. In this work, we develop a deep conditional generative model for structured output prediction using Gaussian latent variables. The model is trained efficiently in the framework of stochastic gradient variational Bayes, and allows for fast prediction using stochastic feed-forward inference. In addition, we provide novel strategies to build robust structured prediction algorithms, such as input noise-injection and multi-scale prediction objective at training. In experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm in comparison to the deterministic deep neural network counterparts in generating diverse but realistic structured output predictions using stochastic inference. Furthermore, the proposed training methods are complimentary, which leads to strong pixel-level object segmentation and semantic labeling performance on Caltech-UCSD Birds 200 and the subset of Labeled Faces in the Wild dataset.
Accessorize to a Crime: Real and Stealthy Attacks on State-of-the-Art Face Recognition
(2016)

Machine learning is enabling a myriad innovations, including new algorithms for cancer diagnosis and self-driving cars. The broad use of machine learning makes it important to understand the extent to which machine-learning algorithms are subject to attack, particularly when used in applications where physical security or safety is at risk.
 In this paper, we focus on facial biometric systems, which are widely used in surveillance and access control. We define and investigate a novel class of attacks: attacks that are physically realizable and inconspicuous, and allow an attacker to evade recognition or impersonate another individual. We develop a systematic method to automatically generate such attacks, which are realized through printing a pair of eyeglass frames. When worn by the attacker whose image is supplied to a state-of-the-art face-recognition algorithm, the eyeglasses allow her to evade being recognized or to impersonate another individual. Our investigation focuses on white-box face-recognition systems, but we also demonstrate how similar techniques can be used in black-box scenarios, as well as to avoid face detection.
Adversarial Generative Nets: Neural Network Attacks on State-of-the-Art Face Recognition
(2017)

In this paper we show that misclassification attacks against face-recognition systems based on deep neural networks (DNNs) are more dangerous than previously demonstrated, even in contexts where the adversary can manipulate only her physical appearance (versus directly manipulating the image input to the DNN). Specifically, we show how to create eyeglasses that, when worn, can succeed in targeted (impersonation) or untargeted (dodging) attacks while improving on previous work in one or more of three facets: (i) inconspicuousness to onlooking observers, which we test through a user study; (ii) robustness of the attack against proposed defenses; and (iii) scalability in the sense of decoupling eyeglass creation from the subject who will wear them, i.e., by creating “universal” sets of eyeglasses that facilitate misclassification. Central to these improvements are adversarial generative nets, a method we propose to generate physically realizable attack artifacts (here, eyeglasses) automatically.
Learning with a Strong Adversary
(2015)

The robustness of neural networks to intended perturbations has recently attracted significant attention. In this paper, we propose a new method, learning with a strong adversary, that learns robust classifiers from supervised data by generating adversarial examples as an intermediate step. A new and simple way of finding adversarial examples is presented that is empirically stronger than existing approaches in terms of the accuracy reduction as a function of perturbation magnitude. Experimental results demonstrate that resulting learning method greatly improves the robustness of the classification models produced.
Deep learning from temporal coherence in video
(2009)

This work proposes a learning method for deep architectures that takes advantage of sequential data, in particular from the temporal coherence that naturally exists in unlabeled video recordings. That is, two successive frames are likely to contain the same object or objects. This coherence is used as a supervisory signal over the unlabeled data, and is used to improve the performance on a supervised task of interest. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method on some pose invariant object and face recognition tasks.
Software Re-Modularization Based on Structural and Semantic Metrics
(2010)

The structure of a software system has a major impact on its maintainability. To improve maintainability, software systems are usually organized into subsystems using the constructs of packages or modules. However, during software evolution the structure of the system undergoes continuous modifications, drifting away from its original design, often reducing its quality. In this paper we propose an approach for helping maintainers to improve the quality of software modularization. The proposed approach analyzes the (structural and semantic) relationships between classes in a package identifying chains of strongly related classes. The identified chains are used to define new packages with higher cohesion than the original package. The proposed approach has been empirical evaluated through a case study. The context of the study is represented by an open source system, JHotDraw, and two software systems developed by teams of students at the University of Salerno. The analysis of the results reveals that the proposed approach generates meaningful re-modularization of the studied systems, which can lead to higher quality.
Towards a Welsh Semantic Annotation System
(2018)

Automatic semantic annotation of natural language data is an important task in Natural Language Processing, and a variety of semantic taggers have been developed for this task, particularly for English. However, for many languages, particularly for low-resource languages, such tools are yet to be developed. In this paper, we report on the development of an automatic Welsh semantic annotation tool (named CySemTagger) in the CorCenCC Project, which will facilitate semantic-level analysis of Welsh language data on a large scale. Based on Lancaster’s USAS semantic tagger framework, this tool tags words in Welsh texts with semantic tags from a semantic classification scheme, and is designed to be compatible with multiple Welsh POS taggers and POS tagsets by mapping different tagsets into a core shared POS tagset that is used internally by CySemTagger. Our initial evaluation shows that the tagger can cover up to 91.78% of words in Welsh text. This tagger is under continuous development, and will provide a critical tool for Welsh language corpus and information processing at semantic level.
Two (Note) Heads Are Better Than One: Pen-Based Multimodal Interaction with Music Scores
(2016)

Digitizing early music sources requires new ways of dealing with musical documents. Assuming that current technologies cannot guarantee a perfect automatic transcription, our intention is to develop an interactive system in which user and software collaborate to complete the task. Since conventional score post-editing might be tedious, the user is allowed to interact using an electronic pen. Although this provides a more ergonomic interface, this interaction must be decoded as well. In our framework, the user traces the symbols using the electronic pen over a digital surface, which provides both the underlying image (offline data) and the drawing made by the e-pen (online data) to improve classification. Applying this methodology over 70 scores of the target musical archive, a dataset of 10 230 bimodal samples of 30 different symbols was obtained and made available for research purposes. This paper presents experimental results on classification over this dataset, in which symbols are recognized by combining the two modalities. This combination of modes has demonstrated its good performance, decreasing the error rate of using each modality separately and achieving an almost error-free performance.
Efficient Event-Driven Simulation of Large Networks of Spiking Neurons and Dynamical Synapses
(2000)

A simulation procedure is described for making feasible large-scale simulations of recurrent neural networks of spiking neurons and plastic synapses. The procedure is applicable if the dynamic variables of both neurons and synapses evolve deterministically between any two successive spikes. Spikes introduce jumps in these variables, and since spike trains are typically noisy, spikes introduce stochasticity into both dynamics. Since all events in the simulation are guided by the arrival of spikes, at neurons or synapses, we name this procedure event-driven. The procedure is described in detail, and its logic and performance are compared with conventional (synchronous) simulations. The main impact of the new approach is a drastic reduction of the computational load incurred upon introduction of dynamic synaptic efficacies, which vary organically as a function of the activities of the pre- and postsynaptic neurons. In fact, the computational load per neuron in the presence of the synaptic dynamics grows linearly with the number of neurons and is only about 6 more than the load with fixed synapses. Even the latter is handled quite efficiently by the algorithm. We illustrate the operation of the algorithm in a specific case with integrate-and-fire neurons and specific spike-driven synaptic dynamics. Both dynamical elements have been found to be naturally implementable in VLSI. This network is simulated to show the effects on the synaptic structure of the presentation of stimuli, as well as the stability of the generated matrix to the neural activity it induces.
The Human Brain in Numbers: A Linearly Scaled-up Primate Brain
(2009)

The human brain has often been viewed as outstanding among mammalian brains: the most cognitively able, the largest-than-expected from body size, endowed with an overdeveloped cerebral cortex that represents over 80% of brain mass, and purportedly containing 100 billion neurons and 10x more glial cells. Such uniqueness was seemingly necessary to justify the superior cognitive abilities of humans over larger-brained mammals such as elephants and whales. However, our recent studies using a novel method to determine the cellular composition of the brain of humans and other primates as well as of rodents and insectivores show that, since different cellular scaling rules apply to the brains within these orders, brain size can no longer be considered a proxy for the number of neurons in the brain. These studies also showed that the human brain is not exceptional in its cellular composition, as it was found to contain as many neuronal and non-neuronal cells as would be expected of a primate brain of its size. Additionally, the so-called overdeveloped human cerebral cortex holds only 19% of all brain neurons, a fraction that is similar to that found in other mammals. In what regards absolute numbers of neurons, however, the human brain does have two advantages compared to other mammalian brains: compared to rodents, and probably to whales and elephants as well, it is built according to the very economical, space-saving scaling rules that apply to other primates; and, among economically built primate brains, it is the largest, hence containing the most neurons. These findings argue in favor of a view of cognitive abilities that is centered on absolute numbers of neurons, rather than on body size or encephalization, and call for a re-examination of several concepts related to the exceptionality of the human brain.